


between my teeth

by liadan14



Series: ready for the comedown [2]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Anal Sex, Angst, Belgium 1870s, Bottom Booker, Bottom Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Joe introspection, M/M, Oral Sex, Pining, Some mention of religion, Threesome, Top Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Topping from the Bottom, Undernegotiated Threesome, historical setting, undernegotiated sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:20:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26049418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liadan14/pseuds/liadan14
Summary: Accepting their invitation to bed when they had all been drinking gin was a bad idea Booker should have seen coming a mile away. The stuff had caused riots. But Booker had never claimed to be all that smart. Their fingers had been clumsy with alcohol, but it was the first time since his sons’ deaths that Booker felt like a real human again, held fast between Nicky and Joe, Joe driving into him from behind and erasing all thought from his head besides the pulse of Joe’s hips and the taste of Nicky’s lips.Or: What happened that time in Bruges.
Relationships: Booker | Sebastien le Livre/Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolo di Genova, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: ready for the comedown [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1890964
Comments: 39
Kudos: 332





	between my teeth

**Author's Note:**

> It can't be that easy, to let another person into a centuries-spanning relationship.
> 
> Prequel to [linger at my door](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25784383).
> 
> Warnings: undernegotiated sex, period-accurate-ish unsafe sex practices

Joe’s relationship to gin isn’t as uncomplicated as to say he likes it. 

He’s been alive long enough to have tried most things he once called haram. He’s been alive long enough to have witnessed things that he once called haram become makrūh, or even halal. 

He’s _lived_ enough to find himself standing in the snow, frozen to the bone and so hungry each of his ribs threatened to poke through his skin, beyond the capacity to care what meat he eats, let alone how it was slaughtered.

He’s lived enough to understand what it means to truly need a drink.

He likes to think Allah would understand. He likes to think, if the exact strictures of the rules meant that much, they wouldn’t have changed, not even over the course of his exceedingly long life. (He doesn’t like to think of the way the lambs squealed, when they were slaughtered, when he briefly became a butcher in Medieval Spain because Nicky was still too Catholic for Muslims to buy meat from).

It has been several hours since they had realized they had no chance of convincing Leopold to lay his fingers off of central Africa. It has been several hours since Andy, jaw clenched, had raided the cupboard under the safehouse’s sink for the four bottles of gin they’d been gifted by the botanist who helped them get access to the Royal Gardens, and, by extension, Leopold, in the first place.

Nicky had wrinkled his nose, but he’d drunk with the rest of them, testament to how exhausted he was. 

It’s been years since the last time they took a real break.

They stick close together and meet regularly, these days. Anything could happen, after all. The specter of arriving in England months too late to find Quynh haunts them, finding only Andy, shackled to the wall of her prison cell, catatonic with grief and covered in filth. But the ever-increasing pace of travel, of life, of atrocities, makes it harder to stomach the never-ending work as the days turn to weeks and months and years of danger and death.

Joe takes a sip of his drink. The first time he’d drunk gin, he’d spat it back out, the sharply medicinal taste of juniper enough to put him off the experience entirely. He’d been mystified at the drink’s popularity. “An empire of lapsed Catholics,” he liked to joke to Nicky about the British obsession with the stuff. “They must like to punish themselves.”

Privately, that is how Joe has come around to gin himself. He imbibes, and it is haram, and the act of drinking terrible alcohol is at the same time punishment for the misstep itself.

Nicky’s eyes smile at him sadly from across the table, mouth still a firm line. He knows what Joe is doing here. He knows everything about Joe.

Andy slams her bottle down on the table, less than half full. They process alcohol faster than most, and Andy has the most experience. Half a bottle of mother’s ruin still has her weaving on her feet when she stands. 

“Andy?” Joe asks her, tongue slow and heavy. “Where are you going.”

“I’ve had enough,” she says. “It’s just…enough. I’m leaving. I’ll see you in a year.”

“In Bucharest?” Booker asks. He’s been silent most of the evening, nursing his drink far more steadily than Joe is capable of.

Andy nods sharply, and then she’s out the door.

Nicky cocks his head at Booker, asking without words.

“She had me make her a British passport two weeks ago,” Booker admits. “I think she’s going back to look. For…she’s going back to look.”

Joe takes another deep drink. “Bucharest?” He asks.

Booker shrugs.

Joe sets down the bottle he and Nicky have been sharing. Maybe in a hundred years, the gin fad will have died down. Maybe the half-full bottle will be worth millions. He scrubs a hand across his face, trying to regain clarity of thought.

Booker takes another sip, then screws the lid of his bottle shut, wiping the last drop off his lips with the back of his hand. His hair is cropped short, but he hasn’t shaved in days, and Joe can hear his stubble scrape against skin. He follows the movement openly.

Nicky rests his hand on Joe’s thigh.

This, too, is something Nicky knows about him.

Nicky has been his for so many years now that Joe cannot fathom a world where that is not the case. The thought alone makes his stomach turn, makes sweat break out on the back of his neck. 

And yet.

Loving Nicky did not make Joe blind. He has appreciated a pretty face for as long as he’s had the faculties to do so; he has appreciated a pretty soul for longer. With Nicky in his life, he has been glutted on beauty both outer and inner so completely, he has longed for nothing else. His appreciation has been purely aesthetic, purely platonic, for nearly eight hundred years.

And yet.

Joe had held Booker as he wept over his sons’ graves.

Joe had taught Booker to wield his scimitar, just in case, both of them sweating bullets in the Moroccan sun, until they had stripped off their shirts. They had fought until neither of them were armed anymore, and then they had grappled, skin against skin, until they were laughing.

Joe had caught the first glimmers of Booker’s smile returning to his face, years after he had thought it never would again, and had felt a part of his own heart react, like a flower blooming after too long out of the sun.

He turns to catch Nicky’s eye, and Nicky smiles at him.

They haven’t spoken of it, but Joe knows Nicky as well as Nicky knows him. It was Nicky’s steady hands that fed Booker, that cooked him tea, when his tears had dried up and his own hands couldn’t function. It was Nicky who had suggested lessons in swordplay, who had whooped when Joe took off his shirt, had encouraged Booker to do the same. 

It was Nicky who made Booker smile again.

Joe stands, abrupt, gin still clouding his head, just enough to for myopia.

He grasps at Booker’s lower arms with either hand, pulling him up.

Booker blinks in confusion, gin bottle by his feet falling and rolling to the side.

For a first kiss, it is too wet, too hot, too full of juniper. Joe has had hundreds of years to remember his first kiss with Nicky, to immortalize it in verse, to romanticize it. Nicky likes to remind him that at the time, neither of them had bathed in weeks and the concept of cleaning one’s teeth had not been invented yet.

Joe likes to remind Nicky how the sun beat on his neck, how Nicky’s mouth had been an oasis in the heat, how shocked wide his eyes had been when Joe pulled away, how flushed pink his skin.

“I had a sunburn,” Nicky demurs when Joe says this, but his lips twitch and Joe knows he is right, for a given value of rightness.

Where Nicky had been shocked at the touch of his lips, Booker is desperate. 

Booker gives under Joe’s touch in a way Nicky never would, accepts what Joe longs to give. When Joe pulls away, lips tingling, Booker’s gaze follows his mouth, pupils blown wide.

Joe doesn’t need to turn to know that Nicky is beside him, to know that Nicky will take his turn next. It is still a shock, to see Nicky’s lips meet Bookers, to see the way Booker turns his head to better accept Nicky’s kiss, to see the creep of Nicky’s hand up Booker’s back. He has tried, time and again, to capture in words how it feels to kiss Nicky. His poems fall flat next to the rough sound caught in Booker’s throat.

Joe takes the opportunity to circle Booker, to come up from behind, to set his hands on the buttons separate them, to kiss behind Booker’s ear. Booker’s head is a welcome weight, pressed back on his shoulder as Nicky continues Joe’s work when Joe no longer can, too tempted to sweep his palms up Booker’s sides, to explore such an unfamiliar terrain.

“Wh – what,” Booker tries to ask.

Joe strokes his close-shorn scalp softly, quiets him gently as if he were a child, unwilling and unable to put into words what they want from him.

Booker gasps as Nicky divests him of the last of his clothes, as Nicky steps close, as Nicky pulls him close, one leg shoved between Booker’s and both hands on his ass.

It feels forbidden, to make noise, to shatter this. Booker’s gasp reverberates in Joe’s ears. Down the street, he hears the drunk students begin to leave the bars and take their festivities outdoors, and he is relieved to hear something besides Booker’s harsh exhales, besides his own unsteady breathing, besides the wet suck of Nicky’s mouth against Booker’s neck. He sinks his teeth into Booker’s shoulder in an effort to silence himself, only to hear the little noise Booker makes when he does, to wish simultaneously to hear it louder and to not hear it at all because now it will live in his mind forever. 

“Joe,” Nicky says, breaking the spell he was under.

His eyes snap up to meet Nicky’s.

Nicky’s hair is pushed back – Booker’s hands – and his eyes are hazy with arousal. 

Joe pulls Booker towards the bed he and Nicky claimed for their own, Nicky following close behind, pulling his shirt over his head and unlacing his trousers.

Booker is bare against the unmade sheets and Joe looks his fill between kisses pressed to his shoulders, his collarbone, his sternum. He’s known what Booker looks like, covered in sweat, in blood, in gunpowder, in dirt. He hadn’t known what Booker looked like with his head thrown back in pleasure, his knuckles fisted tight in the blankets, his cock bobbing hard and red between them.

He tastes, when Joe takes him in his mouth, like and unlike Nicky. Sweat is sweat and skin is skin, and even the bitter note of ejaculate is the same. But Booker has used soap all his life; Booker’s skin doesn’t seem to inhale the spices he eats the same way Nicky’s does; Booker is a different man.

“Joe,” Booker whispers above him. 

“Joe,” Nicky rumbles by his ear.

Joe’s hips press down into the bedsheets of their own accord.

Nicky’s fingers are wet and slippery, bumping under Joe’s chin and reaching towards Booker’s entrance.

Joe pulls away and Booker’s eyes clench shut at the loss or the intrusion or the abundance of touch. 

Booker’s legs splay wide as Nicky works, allowing two men between them. Joe wonders silently at that. Nicky, when Joe had first done this to him, had barely been able to keep his legs open, clenching up with shame and nerves and uncertainty. Joe had twitched along his whole body when Nicky returned the favor, dislodging them both more than once.

There have rarely been times, in the last sixty years, that Booker has not been reticent with them, hiding his grief, smothering his emotion.

Yet here he is, as open and trusting as Joe has ever seen him, for the touch of their hands and the press of their lips.

“Turn him over,” Nicky tells Joe hoarsely, slipping around to place himself against the headboard, his own long legs splayed wide.

For a heady, desperate moment, Joe meets his eyes and sinks into the thought of his embrace.

Booker shifts between them, and Joe recalls Nicky’s demand. With the slightest pressure against Booker’s hips, Joe encourages him onto his hands and knees, slides into place behind him. He looks to Nicky one last time, and at Nicky’s slight nod, he slides into Booker.

In all his very long life, he has only ever been inside of Nicky.

It did not prepare him for this.

He doesn’t know that anything _could_ prepare him for this, the hot weight of Nicky’s eyes as Joe settles, hips flush against Booker’s backside, the sound Booker makes, a bitten-off moan as if he’s trying so hard to respect the quiet between the three of them but can no longer hold himself back.

“Make some noise, dear one,” Joe whispers against his ear, feeling almost wicked as he sees the goosebumps raise all the way down Booker’s spine. 

He starts gentle, barely pulling back and grinding back in deep, keeping himself deep inside Booker. Booker shudders with every move. 

“You can give him more,” Nicky tells Joe. He’s slicking up his fingers again, and Joe wants to look down at Booker, to see every shake and hear every bitten-off moan Booker makes for him, but he’s held fast by Nicky’s eyes as Nicky slides his fingers into himself, never looking away from Joe. 

Joe is helpless to do anything but follow Nicky’s orders. 

He withdraws further, sinks in harder, and Booker makes a sound Joe’s never heard from him before, pure pleasure. 

“He needs more,” Nicky repeats. “Don’t you see him?" 

The noise Booker makes sounds like assent. 

Joe isn’t sure if this is what hell is meant to be, caught between his favorite sight in the world – his Nicky, breathless and aroused, ordering him around – and something he’s been dying to see for perhaps longer than he was willing to admit, Booker open and desperate around his cock. 

He gives it to Booker harder, kneeling upright, sacrificing the ability to press kisses into Booker’s shoulders for the leverage to piston his hips in and out. The friction makes his eyes cross momentarily. The sight of Booker’s ass makes it impossible to do anything but grip each cheek in his palms, spreading Booker wide as he pounds in and in and in, the angle tight to what must be Booker’s prostate as he muffles his yells into the bed. 

He slaps Booker’s ass on instinct, and Booker contracts around him. 

Joe’s eyes slide shut, just missing the moment Nicky slips a third finger into himself. 

“Please,” Booker gasps out. “Please.” There’s a red-hot flush down the back of his neck, and when Joe grips him by the shoulder, pulls him upright against Joe until Joe’s sitting back on his haunches, pushing up into Booker, gripping at his cock with his left hand, he sees that the flush extends down his whole chest. 

His cock is dripping, wet and purple and Booker’s head falls back against Joe’s shoulder again. Joe’s mouth has just reconnected with Booker’s neck, tasting sweat and feeling Booker’s moans, when he catches Nicky’s eye. 

“Don’t come, Joe,” Nicky warns, his own fingers deep inside himself. “I want to feel you, wet from him, inside me." 

Booker comes, then, shooting wet stripes up to his collarbone, convulsing and clenching around Joe. He’s gasping out little noises under his breath that Joe wants to hear again and again. 

He pulls himself out of Booker as gently as he knows how, half-mad with desire. He can feel his pulse in his cock. 

Booker scrambles to the side, and Joe can see out the corner of his eye that Booker can barely move, boneless. He feels a flash of pride, but he can’t really think, not with Nicky splayed out before him, nothing in the way. 

Nicky arches up when Joe sinks into him, still wet with the oil Nicky used on Booker. “Joe,” he moans, and Joe has to muffle his own noises into Nicky’s neck. 

“Nicky,” he’s saying into Nicky’s skin, “Nicky, Nicky, please.” His hips are working constantly, no time for the slow build he gave Booker, nothing but the insistent pulse of the orgasm waiting just under his skin. 

Nicky shatters all around him, coming into his own fist with a grunt of satisfaction. He flutters around Joe for what feels like hours, dragging out his pleasure to the utmost, until Joe feels insane with it. He has to clench his eyes shut just to be able to fuck Nicky though it, to prolong it until the last possible minute. 

When he opens his eyes, Nicky is holding his soiled hand out for Booker to lick. 

Joe comes instantly, so hard his balls ache, so hard he yells into Nicky’s shoulder, so hard he can’t move for minutes after it’s over. 

He crashes to the bed eventually on Booker’s left, Nicky lying to his right. 

“I’ll get up in a moment,” Booker slurs, already more than half asleep. “I’ll leave you alone, just a moment…” 

His breathing evens out not long after. 

Joe looks over at Nicky helplessly. 

He already knows that he won’t forget this. 

He already knows that he won’t look at Booker as a brother, as a friend. 

He already knows what he’ll feel. 

Nicky meets his eyes steadily. “I can’t give you up,” Nicky says, then, and Joe’s heart breaks. 

“I would never ask it,” Joe responds, instant, a reflex as sure as breathing. 

“Could you give him up?" 

_I don’t know_ , Joe thinks, and he knows Nicky can read it on his face as sure as he can read any of Joe’s emotions. 

They leave for Malta before dawn, a crumpled note for Booker on the nightstand. 

\- 

“Will he be alright?” Nicky asks Joe, leaning back into his arms, on the balcony of their house in Malta. 

Joe swallows. “He knows this address. He could find us if he isn’t.” 

Nicky looks up at him, and Joe sees his own indecision staring back at him. 

It is a relief and a disappointment when Booker doesn’t follow them. 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [tumblr](http://bewires.tumblr.com)
> 
> The title of this fic is from Orla Gartland's "Between My Teeth", with the very apt lyrics "please don't lean on me/I don't want your heart between my teeth"
> 
> Series title is from Orla Gartland's Did It To Myself, which is such a Booker song.


End file.
